This isn’t original work, so perhaps more suited to being in my soup than this blog, but it’s so cool it just has to be on Planet Lisp. perfectstorm is: a real time strategy game study written in Common Lisp using OpenGL for graphics display and cairo for texture generation. Looks very very interesting. Google SoC students take note: this is an open source project (-: (found via neingeist)

(This blog entry is outdated. The currently recommended way to get lisp software and its dependencies is quicklisp). Outdated information It has been brought to our attention that asdf-install is still thought to be the preferred way to install cool lisp software. I would like to use this space to advertise an alternative tool that too few people know about, and that allows you to almost instantly (OK, as fast as your computer can install the required software and download & build the packages) get you up and running with and get you updates of the newest in cool lisp packages.

Recently, I got a used Mac Mini from a friend; I decided to put it to good use as a media station in my living room, and it does indeed work pretty well (after fixing it up with codecs that are in use in the real world, but that’s not the topic of this article (-:). One thing that I find very useful is the ability to import movie files (that one might download from the vast and unfriendly-to-copyright-holders internet, as described here for instance) into iTunes on my desktop mac and have the Front Row thing on the living room machine play them over the network.

A few weeks ago, I tried using S-XML-RPC for use with a hunchentoot-based web interface to rtorrent. Unfortunately, it comes with a long list of dependencies that are already implemented better by Ediware such as drakma: it can speak HTTPS, connect via proxies, and allows cookies (although I’m not aware of any xml-rpc implementation that supports this (-:). So I re-implemented s-xml-rpc’s client part to use the libraries that are already available in clbuild, and got a pretty pleasant-to-use library.

I just upgraded this blog to MovableType 4, for which this is a test entry. While I’m at it, I might as well say things about where I’ve been gone in the last couple of months. First, I spent a lovely week in Cambridge, MA, consulting for ITA software. (Photographic evidence here.) Now I’m hacking on a sweet new project again (news about that in due time, I promise). In the meantime, I started a new (lighter on the technical content, heavier on the pop cultural stuff) tumblelog at http://mublag.

ASDF(reference manual) is a fine piece of software: I like to use it, and find some of the design choices in it to be very good (besides, it’s the thing that has allowed things like clbuild and asdf-install to grow). However, it is now in wide enough use that people are looking at its internals and are scratching their heads when finding some not-so-very-good design choices. Here’s a selection of the things that I think would be good candidates for review in a new version of ASDF (bsdf?

I just attended my first CACert assurance party thing. It started off with a 2-hour talk that gave information that could be easily extracted (with a bit of patience for bad english grammar and spelling) from their wiki. Two things that stuck out to me (like, indeed, sore thumbs): PGP key signatures are useless, because a signature on a key doesn’t tell you anything about the standards that were used to get the key owner’s identity to the signing party.

First of all, thanks to all who congratulated me on this, and to Nicolas for starting it all. CLAPPA is the project I submitted for funding to the Google Summer of Code, which is now being funded by clozure. The main idea behind the project is to have a package repository for asdf-install that presents information more nicely than does cliki. When I talked about doing something like this project on #lisp, Nicolas Lamirault spoke up and told me he had something that was part of the way there already – CLAPPA.

The talks were good, but most of the interesting stuff at conferences happens in the coffee breaks, anyway. (-: Here’s a list of half-to-fully-baked ideas that I’m going to explore in the near future: First of all, the CLAPPA, the CL APPlication Archive (link may be down due to my hacking on it) project got funding. The LispNYC breakout group rated it high for google Summer of Code, but then Marco Baringer told me Clozure would be interested in funding this.